Privacy as a weapon

Remember the bogus bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh? Apparently they were sent by email, anonymously, through a system called Mixmaster. The email passed through a computer in New York, which the FBI seized in April.

Now it is natural to wonder why we even have such things. Why is it OK for people to send email anonymously when it can cause such mayhem? Here’s what the computer’s owners have to say about it:

Q: Doesn’t Mixmaster/anonymous remailers enable criminals to do bad things?

A: Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than mixmaster provides. They can steal cell phones, use them, and throw them in a ditch; they can crack into computers in Korea or Brazil and use them to launch abusive activities; they can use spyware, viruses, and other techniques to take control of literally millions of Windows machines around the world.

Mixmaster aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that.

All this is true, up to a point. Criminals have actually done all those things. It is also entirely plausible, though, that the particular culprit in question chose Mixmaster. Shortly after that server was seized, the bomb threats stopped.

My thoughts about privacy have changed. I used to think this:

People who keep secrets have something to hide.

I understood at the time that it was a simplistic truism, but it seemed useful anyway. But it’s not useful, because:

People who wear clothes have something to hide.

See? It just doesn't work. Here is what I think now:

Everyone has something to hide from a sufficiently reprehensible adversary.

It doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as lightly.

The FBI in this case was presumably acting with the best intentions, but many governments around the world are plenty reprehensible. Privacy cuts both ways. The ability to track down a miscreant sending bogus bomb threats is exactly the same thing as the ability of an oppressive government to track down activists and rebels and kill them. This is a real concern in some places, and people in those places have to use secure systems that protect their privacy or else give up the fight.

I do think it’s good to have some form of technological constraint on government surveillance, in addition to a reasonable system of checks and balances (requiring warrants for wiretaps, for example). Tracking people down and finding out every detail of what they’ve been doing should be hard. If it’s not, the government will eventually just track everything we do.

People who work on privacy and censorship-circumvention software have already shifted to building systems where there’s no central equipment to seize. Systems like Tor. Governments still have ways of attacking such systems, technologically and otherwise. How governments have tried to block Tor is a startling and absolutely fascinating 2011 talk about this. Watch the first five minutes of that.

One last thing. Anyone in the U.S. will recognize the “Criminals can already do bad things” quote as an argument against gun control. Whether it’s anonymity or a handgun, powerful tools have both offensive and defensive uses. Giving everyone such power is dangerous. Taking this power away from the people is dangerous.

Powerful stuff

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech is full of poetry, metaphor, and allusion. Twice King quotes Scripture.

Amos 5:21-24 is one of the few places in the whole Bible where God is actually said to hate anything. It is nonetheless my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament, the one that I think comes closest to reconciling fire and brimstone with love and mercy. The verse King quotes comes rather unexpectedly in the middle of an angry prophetic tirade:

I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

King is never angry, but at this point in his speech he is firm, insistent, even stern, and so his use of this verse at the end echoes Amos slightly. It’s an artful touch and a little brilliant.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Isaiah 40:3-5 says:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

King adopts this as his ultimate dream.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

As King quotes this—there is no sugar-coating this—he teeters on the verge of nonsense. Not only is this prophecy already supposedly fulfilled (in John the Baptist, according to the gospels, all four of which directly quote it), but right after this passage about mountains being leveled, King is about to go into a series of riffs about, well, mountains (“let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” and so on).

It works anyway, because whatever we think of the gospels, it is manifest that some crooked paths remain that want straightening, and rough places, and all the rest. King’s message is that justice will not be denied. Scripture promises the dream will be fulfilled.

Dangerous eggs

Among the dangerous contraband items U.S. border officials look for when they search your car are Kinder Surprise candy eggs. The CBC has an account of one seizure. Punchline:

As trivial as the border seizure may seem, Bird said the U.S. government has sent her a seven-page letter asking her to formally authorize the destruction of her seized Kinder egg.

“I thought it was a joke. I had to read it twice. But they are serious,” she said.

The letter states if Bird wishes to contest the seizure, she’ll have to pay $250 for it to be stored as the two sides wrangle over it.

The overbearing threats, the lawyerly paperwork, the sheer pointlessness of it all—it’s like a portrait in miniature of U.S. law enforcement. It’s so poetic I could cry.

I think my view of government is getting warped. Every senseless indignity is starting to look less like random incompetence and more like a dominance display.

Wikileaks, journalism, and espionage

WOLF: Jeff, can I talk about the Espionage Act because that's really what's at stake now that they've invoked it. I predicted in my book The End of America that sooner or later, journalists would be targeted with the Espionage Act in an effort to close down free speech and (INAUDIBLE) of government. And we have a precedent for that. In 1917, the Espionage Act was invoked to go after people like us who were criticizing the first World War. Publishers, educators, editors. Wait, and people were put in prison. They were beaten. One guy got a 10-year sentence for reading the First Amendment. And that intimidation effectively closed down dissent for a decade in the United States of America.

The Espionage Act has a very dark and dirty history. And when you start to use the Espionage Act, to criminalize what—I'm sure you've handled classified documents in your time as a serious journalist, you know perfectly well that every serious journalist has seen or heard about classified information and repeated it. When you start to use the Espionage Act to say reporting is treachery, reporting is spying, it's espionage, you criminalize journalism. And that's the history that our country has shown.

TOOBIN: I recognize there is that history. And I'm familiar with the red scare, too. America is different now.

WOLF: Oh, it's worse in some ways.

TOOBIN: Well, I would disagree.

SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?

TOOBIN: I'd have to know a lot more.

SPITZER: But it might be the case.

TOOBIN: It well might be the case.

SPITZER: OK. So your sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something—maybe not so much.

TOOBIN: I'm not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal—criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don't put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.

SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discussions are rationale, where we would go, spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.

TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified—

SPITZER: A lot of people who didn't have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.

TOOBIN: I always wondered why—why Woodward gets away with it. It's an interesting question.

(CROSSTALK)

—Naomi Wolf, Jeff Toobin, and Eliot Spitzer, talking on CNN's Parker Spitzer December 23, 2010. (transcript)

(Sidebar: Toobin was either indulging in a little hyperbole, or he was under the impression that all the cables were released unredacted. Not that it makes a huge difference, but this is not what happened. Wikileaks has been working with five newspapers, including the New York Times, to redact the cables before they are released publicly. As of January 10, 2011, Wikileaks has released only 2,028 of the 251,287 cables. They have been releasing a few each day.)

When Dianne Feinstein called for Julian Assange's prosecution under the Espionage Act, she wrote:

Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions. But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.

But what exactly is Assange or Wikileaks doing that investigative journalists do not do? Cultivating contacts with privileged access? Obtaining classified documents? Reading them? Publishing them? Refusing to reveal sources? Pushing an agenda? Trying to make a difference? Those are all things journalists do. It is arguably impossible to do the job right without doing those things.

Why does Bob Woodward get away with it?

Why indeed.

Questions about net neutrality

(I originally wrote the following in October 2009, but did not publish it because it seemed likely that I just didn't know what I was talking about, and everything was OK. That's still likely, but recent events suggest I could be wrong about that.)

This video starts out great. It's about what makes fertile ground for innovation. After about 2 minutes, it goes off into “I have a right to Internet access” territory, and it never really comes back.

The open Web means a lot to me personally. Everything this video starts out saying is true. The openness of the technology and the current benign behavior of the network owners means people can try stuff on an awesome scale. Life-changing stuff. Funny stuff. Stupid stuff. It's not hard; it's not expensive; anyone who has the hardware, software, network access, experience, and free time can do it. And once you have the first four, it's like magic. All you need is more free time. It's romantic and wonderful, and it's all true. (I know because once I had a lot of free time.)

Mozilla came out in favor of net neutrality last year after a long silence. I still have a lot of unanswered questions.

• Do we really have to invite the FCC to regulate the Internet? The video invokes the threat of censorship. But um, the FCC is the country's foremost censor. This is the agency that mandated the broadcast flag, that fined Clear Channel for carrying Howard Stern, that maintained a three-network TV oligopoly for decades. This is where the Parents Television Council sends letters when someone says something vulgar on network TV. The FCC is the antithesis of the Internet.

  Of course the Internet is protected by the First Amendment in ways broadcast media aren't, and the FCC knows that. The plan is that the FCC will work in the opposite direction, preventing carriers from filtering while resisting political pressures to indulge in unconstitutional censorship of its own. I'm skeptical. Astute observers may have noticed that the First Amendment is not really a guarantee of good behavior.

  (Before you blow me off, read the next point. I really believe the bigger a role we ask the FCC to play in Internet the more it will find itself facing very difficult questions about what content should be allowed.)

(Since I originally wrote this, a court ruled that as it stands, the FCC does not have the authority to enforce its new net neutrality rules. The FCC responded by saying it will “move to partially reclassify broadband as a common-carrier service” and at the same time “try to establish that it will not regulate many areas of broadband”.)

• There are questions of where to draw the line.

  Google has already gotten itself into the awkward spot of having to argue that, while the FCC should impose net neutrality rules on broadband carriers, the rules should not apply to applications Google builds on top of those networks:

  The FCC's open Internet principles apply only to the behavior of broadband carriers -- not the creators of Web-based software applications.

  I think what we want is a neutral infrastructure and vibrant content. Well, is a web browser infrastructure or content? How about a search engine? You need both to use the Internet effectively these days. Google offers products in both those markets. Should they be subject to neutrality rules? AT&T says yes, the FCC should police the entire Internet, but that's just AT&T being evil for effect. Is there a good answer to the question?

• Net neutrality advocates want ISPs to charge by the bit, not by content. Don't actual humans hate being charged by the bit? Do you like being charged by the minute for cell phone service? I always found it kind of annoying.

  I guess humans hate being charged by content too, but honestly I am happy with having to choose basic cable vs. various channel packages and I'm glad I don't have a meter on my TV.

• So I saw this picture on Twitter, and the story it tells is, “Your ISP wants to double your monthly bill for access to the whole Internet. Net neutrality is about saving you money.” Do they really? And is that really what it's about?

  Incidentally, why do I need a picture of a world without net neutrality rules? Am I not already living in that world?

• As I understand it, the U.S. doesn't really have net neutrality regulations yet, and ISPs are not in fact doing any of the things I'm supposed to be worried about. What am I missing?

  I guess Comcast was blocking Bittorrent for a while. I don't know much about that case, but I suspect Comcast just (cluelessly) took Bittorrent as a proxy for “this customer is going to soak up a ton of bandwidth and then get us sued”. Is that wrong?

  Most ISPs don't let you run a Web server or a mail server out of your home, either, and strictly speaking that's a violation of net neutrality, right? Now to the extent that they're just segmenting the market, I don't really care either way. But to the extent that those types of content actually cost more per bit to carry (security risk, legal liability, tech support, etc.), net neutrality would be bad, right?

• I suspect the real issue is that Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't want to pay my ISP for the privilege of sending me ads. I'm sure my ISP would love to be able to charge them for that, and that prospect probably terrifies Google in particular. Am I being too cynical? Would this be a bad thing? Is it right for Google to lobby the federal government to protect their profits?

I realize this probably reads like so much FUD, but it's meant as a collection of honest questions and I really do appreciate any answers you can provide. I still haven't made up my mind about net neutrality. The questions that intuitively seem important to me don't seem to have been part of the discourse.

Arms

I am flushing the buffer of old posts. Here is one I delayed posting because it's just too boring. Well, I'm posting it anyway. Sorry.

xkcd has a provocative comic about cryptography.

I imagine many geeks are moderately in favor of gun control but staunchly opposed to cryptography control. The two issues are very similar.

Having a gun lets you do two basic things: intimidate unarmed people; and resist armed or otherwise violent people. (You can of course just shoot people, but the power of a gun starts working at some remove from that eventuality. Most cops never shoot anyone.) Neither ability is necessary unless something has gone wrong; and both abilities can themselves go wrong in spectacular ways.

I believe in a fundamental human right to self defense, and for both moral and pragmatic reasons I tend to prefer individual rights to the common good where they conflict. So ab initio I pretty much have to oppose gun control unless there is a strong reason to think it's pragmatically the only way to go.

But I also believe gun control is an all-or-nothing proposition in practice: imposing a five-day waiting period before someone can buy a handgun, for example, makes no sense at all to me. Measures that are obviously easily circumvented, like the current U.S. background check, also make no sense. These measures seem squarely targeted at established, law-abiding gun sellers and their law-abiding customers. Effectively preventing criminals from having guns would require serious bookkeeping requirements and a tremendous enforcement effort. Judging by the results in the places where that has been tried (Illinois, the UK) it just doesn't seem worth it.

Who buys this stuff?

My search continues for something substantial to read from an economist in favor of the bailout. On TV, they all appear to favor it (using vague language and lots of clichés), but on the Internet, they all seem to oppose it (with compelling economic arguments).

I thought I may have found it when I ran across a dire quote from Nouriel Roubini in a newspaper, warning of economic woes to come. Then I went to his web site. It turns out Roubini recently wrote an article entitled “Is Purchasing $700 billion of Toxic Assets the Best Way to Recapitalize the Financial System? No! It is Rather a Disgrace and Rip-Off Benefitting only the Shareholders and Unsecured Creditors of Banks”. Heh! It turns out he's just generally gloomy and has been for years; it didn't start after yesterday's vote.

Reporters have done a bad job with this one. There's the usual ignorance of economics, but it's more than that. They seem to be caught up in the crisis atmosphere. They're not objective. Worse, they never seem to distinguish between Wall Street investors and economists, never mind hysteria and reason.

My Representative

I wrote to my Representative, Jim Cooper, and three days ago, he wrote back:

...I hate the thought of paying ransom to Wall Street, especially when Main Street is struggling. I am furious that our financial situation has been allowed to get this point, and that Treasury is considering bailing out the lenders who helped caused this to occur.

Then he voted for the bailout. According to this morning's USA Today, he said, “It's mainly political fear, the reaction back home. It's the most difficult time for people to be statesmen, 37 days before an election.”

Crowd vs. Committee

I just found this in an old notebook. Apparently I wrote it a couple years ago. Most of it seems to make more sense to me now.

Wisdom of Crowds	Design by Committee
Both: Participants may be biased.
Bias averages out	Bias creates “riders”
Not much work	Lots of work
No consensus required	Seeks consensus. Decisions may be postponed to avoid stirring up trouble.
Minority (“special”) interests can be publicised but are often ignored	Minority interests are not ignored
No experts—skepticism (Presumption is that a random individual is not an expert.)	All experts—openness
Lossy, mass communication (of arguments, etc.)	Tedious explicit communication
Both: No overarching design or uniting vision.
Nobody cares	Possibly competing visions
Simple output.	Unbounded complexity in output.
Immediate feedback.	Long-term, invisible feedback.
Individuals have low individual impact.	Individuals are influential.
Neglecting the topic somehow doesn't matter.	Neglect causes warts (that is, areas where the design is painfully bad —ed.)
Product needn't be understood (markets)	Product is ideas.
Mechanism for approaching a good result exists (market; averaging)	Democracy (voting) and consensus are the only such mechanisms.
Interfaces are well-defined before work starts (ballot; prices)	Interfaces have to be designed.
Individuals can't introduce bureaucracy	Individuals sometimes manage to introduce bureaucracy

Constitutional law fact of the day

I didn't know this: apparently a nursing mother has a Constitutionally protected right to breastfeed her child. The following block quote describes Dike v. Orange County School Board, 650 F.2d 783 (5th Cir., 1981).

[A] teacher wanted to nurse her baby on her duty free lunch break. The school claimed that insurance provisions prohibited teachers from bringing their children onto school property, and also prohibited teachers from leaving the school grounds during the day. The trial court ruled that the mother had no right to breastfeed. In Dike, the appeals court reversed the case and remanded it for a new trial, stating that breastfeeding is a protected constitutional right. “Breastfeeding is the most elemental form of parental care. It is a communion between mother and child that, like marriage, is ‘intimate to the degree of being sacred,’ Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. at 486, 85 S. Ct. at 1682, 14 L. Ed. 2d at 516. Nourishment is necessary to maintain the child's life, and the parent may choose to believe that breastfeeding will enhance the child's psychological as well as physical health. In light of the spectrum of interests that the Supreme Court has held specially protected we conclude that the Constitution protects from excessive state interference a woman's decision respecting breastfeeding her child.” 650 F.2d at 787

Constitutional rights are not absolute, and often collide with legitimate, recognized interests. Sometimes the courts must balance individual rights with state interests. In the Dike case, the trial court determined that the state had a legitimate interest in restricting the teacher's comings and goings because of certain school policies. Although the appellate court ruled that mothers have a constitutional right to breastfeed, Mrs. Dike did not have the right to leave school to go home and nurse her baby, or to bring her baby on to school grounds.

—Elizabeth N. Baldwin, “A Look at Enacting Breastfeeding Legislation”

It's really cool what happened here. The lower court said, in an offhand way, “There's nowhere in the Constitution it says you have a right to X.” And the higher court, showing truly inspiring wisdom, says, “Look again.” Over the years, I think the U.S. courts have been better than anyone could've reasonably expected about protecting “personal” rights, beyond the political rights that the Constitution addresses most directly. It's a sometimes thing, but on a good day, the government can't just go in and randomly muck about with your private life. It's nice to be an American.

Election day

On Tuesday, I can vote for incumbent Republican Charlie Bass, Democrat Paul Hodes, or Libertarian Ken Blevens. ::sigh::

"We all have a common enemy..."

Marquette University censors the office doors of its Ph.D. students. A quote from a noted terrorist has been removed.

Sorry, did I say terrorist? I meant syndicated humor columnist. The censored quote is from Dave Barry. Click the link. The story defies belief (and the quote is actually kind of funny).

Why does no one seem to care about this? A little part of me dies every time I read a story like this. It takes me a while to get over it. "Free speech zones" on university campuses. God help us.

There's a word for that

(Ed. note: More stuff written long ago but never posted...)

A brief piece in the Economist last year decried the fate of a word of which that periodical is particularly fond. In Europe, it has become a slur for the right wing; in America it's an even more pejorative label for the left.

The Economist's own political viewpoint is probably best described as center-right. It couples the leftist idea that government exists for the greater good of all people (not strictly to preserve individual rights) with the right wing's abiding suspicion of centralized government power and its conviction that the way to pursue social justice is to reduce regulation and let free markets work. “There's a word for that,” the essay asserts (echoing a Bush campaign speech), “and we want it back.” The much-abused word is liberalism.

Alas, this impassioned little essay is available only to Economist online or print subscribers. If that's you, read on.

Wiretaps, redux

This is hardly relevant anymore, but I figured I'd post it for the record.

A few times over the last year, JJ and I discussed the warrantless wiretap program. He's all for it. I have never come away from a conversation with him less convinced of his point of view.

I'm clearly missing something fundamental. Here's Power Line Blog arguing back in December 2005 that the program is clearly legal, citing court decisions affirming the President's authority to gather foreign intelligence without having to bother with warrants. Here's the Wall Street Journal doing the same thing.

(Now to begin with, I'm more suspicious of executive power than those courts—I'm even suspicious of the FISC, if it comes to that—but let's set that aside.)

My question is, is this executive power completely without limits? Do American citizens have no rights during wartime? Of course not. There's a line somewhere; the question is where. The pro-snooping blogosphere seems to miss this entirely. Certainly they ignore the Times's allegation that some of the snoopees are American citizens.

The entire Journal op-ed focuses on foreign surveillance. It even goes so far as to attempt this reductio ad absurdum:

The leakers of this sensitive national security activity and their Capitol Hill supporters seem determined to guarantee al Qaeda a secure communications channel into this country so long as they remember to include one sympathetic permanent resident alien not previously identified by NSA or the FBI as a foreign agent on their distribution list.

This simply isn't relevant to the surveillance activity actually described in the original Times article, in which names of American citizens (among others) are put on a list of people whose phone conversations and e-mails are secretly monitored. In other words, American citizens were the target of warrantless snooping.

I've noticed that it's really hard to even talk about this with someone. I think that might be because the question has so many logically incompatible lines of scrimmage.

• The program is either Constitutional or not;
• It's either foreign intelligence gathering or it's domestic;
• It's either legal under FISA or not, or FISA doesn't apply;
• FISA generally either makes sense, or it ties the President's hands in a potentially disastrous way;
• Regardless of the particular legal question, the President generally either should or shouldn't exercise absolute power to conduct a war;

...and so on. Now, if you think the program flunks the first test, as I do, then most of the other questions just don't matter—in your nice, little, internally consistent political universe. It's really easy to end up arguing at cross purposes, though. And if you should manage to carry one point, the other guy always thinks he has three or four fallback positions.

I suspect that all of these questions but one are decidable, by any reasonable reading of the law; the sticking point is whether Congress has the authority to constrain the President's ability to conduct war as he sees fit.

But generally I didn't think much of the arguments I was hearing on any level. The President has the authority to take extreme measures in time of war, I'm told: look at the Japanese internment camps in World War II. (But isn't that a strong argument against such unlimited executive power? Is "there have been worse abuses in the past" really the President's best argument?) The three-days retroactive warrant provision in FISA is insufficient because it takes longer than three days to file a case. (I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's awfully hard to see the NSA program as a good-faith response to this difficulty.) The program was not actually secret, because some members of Congress was briefed. (And yet there should be an investigation into who leaked the program, and charges brought? Either it was secret or it wasn't.) As a practical matter, a war can only be fought by a dictator. (Really?)

In any case, it's water under the bridge now.

What about fantasy football?

fishsupreme linked an essay on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology. This made me smile:

It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.

Dungeons and Dragons, an innocent pastime? My, how times have changed.

Katrina revisited

I still don't get the sense that people appreciate how close we were to losing a lot more lives. All it would have taken was one more bureaucratic snafu, a little more fear of liability, a little more concern for appearances, and many thousands more would have died.

I'm talking about what the government got right, the first-order effect: calling for a complete evacuation, no excuses, this means you. It was a day late in coming, I guess. But remember, it had never been done before. Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and President Bush got on the phone and did it (shrewdly spreading the responsibility among the three of them). I don't know how many lives this saved, but I'd guess tens of thousands at a minimum: far more than the actual death toll.

In engineering, if you're looking at thousands dead and you manage to cut that number by 80%, you're having a pretty good day. Somehow we expect a lot more of disaster response. Saving thirty thousand lives is gross incompetence; saving thirty-one thousand is just tolerable; saving thirty-one thousand and twelve is a good job.

A screwy perspective, but maybe it's the right one. If you want to save all the lives, you have to ask for it, and in America we ask by raising a ruckus and throwing the bums out when they get it wrong. Hmm.

What debt/GDP means

Two months ago, I posted a graph of U.S. debt/GDP over the past 55 years. Here's my explanation.

The U.S. GDP is the total value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. each year. It measures of the size of the U.S. economy.

So the ratio of national debt to GDP (debt/GDP) is a measure of debt burden—how big the debt is, compared to the economy. This is sort of like looking at how much an individual owes, compared to his or her salary. Right now the number is 0.643, which means the national debt is 64.3% of GDP for the past 12 months.

Observations:

• Wow, did we have a lot of debt after WWII. Apparently fighting Nazis isn't cheap.
• We never paid it down. The dollar value of the national debt, adjusted for inflation*, hovered around $2 trillion (in 2005 dollars) from 1950 to about 1980. Then it took off upwards. Today it's $8 trillion.
• For a while, it looked like we were outgrowing the debt. By 1981, the GDP was three times what it was in 1950, in real terms.
• We did not outgrow the debt in the Reagan years. And we're not outgrowing it now. Since 1981, except for 6 years of Clinton/Gingrich deadlock (high taxes, slow spending growth), deficit spending has outstripped GDP growth.

The higher debt/GDP gets, the greater the risk of difficulty financing the debt. This ratio is not now at an all-time high; after WWII it was actually much higher than it is today. But it is clearly headed up. This will only get worse as Medicare and Social Security costs rise.

Republicans who think the U.S. can get rid of the debt with pro-growth policies are wrong. Reagan tried it, and debt/GDP went up 36% in 8 years. You actually have to limit spending.

I think we can afford to, and should, pay down the debt in real terms. (Naturally, I think we can do it by eliminating stupid programs.)

*Using the Consumer Price Index, all items. Again, I don't know what I'm doing here, so your mileage may vary.

Bush on the importance of court orders

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

That's President Bush, touting the Patriot Act in April 2004. By the time he made that statement, the President had already personally approved warrantless wiretaps at least sixteen times.

It sure looks like the wiretap thing was illegal to the point of showing utter contempt for democracy and the law, not to mention the Constitution, but I'm not a lawyer. Regardless of its legality, it seems very clear that the program sidesteps checks and balances between secret police and the courts and between the President and Congress.

U.S. history fact of the day

Back in the 1790s, it was apparently taken for granted that the U.S. government was a secular institution. I didn't know this. But it's declared, in the clearest possible language, in a treaty read aloud on the floor of the Senate and signed by President John Adams.

Debt vs. GDP endgame

Why do we even care about the national debt?

Here are four long-term scenarios concerning the debt.

1. We pay it off. This means some suffering, because it won't be cheap. We owe eight trillion dollars. The reward would be that we wouldn't be paying interest on the debt anymore. (There might be an economic reward, as well as the financial one; but I don't know.)

2. We maintain it roughly at steady state, relative to inflation. This means we'd have to stop borrowing to cover the costs of present-day government programs. Assuming the U.S. economy continues to grow (an extremely safe assumption), this means the debt eventually becomes quite easy to pay off. At some point in the future, eight trillion Frosties will be chump change.

3. We maintain it roughly at steady state, relative to GDP. This means paying more and more interest every year; but as long as GDP is growing, we're richer and richer every year, so we don't really feel it. Ever. Economists' comfort level would remain roughly level as the debt grows.

4. We eventually default on the debt. That is, it eventually gets so out of control that we can't roll it over; not enough people will buy our T-bills anymore. Or we make a political decision to bail. From what I hear, this is an extremely bad scenario for the economy.

   Now the nature of debt is that by the time you start to feel the crunch, it's too late. All kinds of economic mayhem will happen before we reach the point of default: interest rates will rise, investment and growth will stall—but these little disasters will not stave off default. By worsening the economy and killing tax revenue, they'll probably accelerate us toward it.

I'm no genius, but it seems like a path somewhere between #1 and #2 might be a good idea. The path we're on right now falls somewhere between #3 and #4.